The current thread about Terry Pratchett's books reminded me I wanted to highlight two quotes...
The first one I'd already posted
here 11 years ago, and it comes (if you will forgive the description, it is accurate, notice the lack of a capital letter) from his first disc-world book:
Quote:
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People had always dreamed of a unified world. We thought it would be a richer one. It wasn't. It meant that the Eskimo got educated and learned cost accountancy, but it didn't mean that the German learned to hunt whales with a spear. It meant everyone learned how to press buttons, and no one remembered how to dive for pearls.
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-- Terry Pratchett,
Strata 1981
The second comes from his penultimate Discworld book, 32 years later:
Quote:
He wasn’t a philosopher and couldn’t even spell the word, but the voice of the goblin officer rang in his head. He thought, what would happen if goblins learned everything about humans and did everything the human way because they thought it was better than the goblin way? How long would it be before they were no longer goblins and left behind everything that was goblin, even their pots? The pots were lovely, he’d bought several for his mum. Goblins took pots seriously now, they sparkled, even at night, but what happens next? Will goblins really stop taking an interest in their pots and will humans learn the serious, valuable and difficult and almost magical skill of pot-making? Or will goblins become, well, just another kind of human? And which would be better?
And then he thought, maybe a policeman should stop thinking about all this because, after all, there was no crime, nothing was wrong . . . and yet in a subtle way, there was. Something was being stolen from the world without anybody noticing or caring.
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-- Terry Pratchett,
Raising Steam 2013